Right now, just about every resort wants to grow their Facebook fan page. And how are they doing it? For the most part, contests and giveaways, and for good reason. A contest gets people participating, builds buzz, and generates clicks on that all-important “like” button. A lift ticket that costs basically nothing to give away can generate more buzz and attention than ever before. However, there is a hurdle, a problem that I hadn’t seen conquered successfully until now.

Let’s say you start a contest and are going to give away 25 free lift tickets when you hit 10,000 fans. Sounds good, right? This will encourage people to invite their friends, right? From my tests and observations, it won’t. If my odds of winning are 0.25%, why would I spend the time to click on 500+ faces to invite them? For other contests without a certain threshold, more fans means less of a chance to win. Why would I decrease my chances of winning by inviting my friends?

So, how do you give an incentive to your fans that will creative enough motivation in each of them to help you grow your fan base where the odds of winning are high enough so it’s worth it to me to try? According to Grand Targhee, the answer is this: make everyone a winner.

The Concept
For every extra 500 fans above 8000 that Grand Targhee snags, the Facebook Friday lift ticket price drops $5, starting at $45. Some simple math shows that if they nail the 10k mark, you’ll be skiing for $25 that Friday. Not too shabby, it motivates me to try and I live 6 hours away.

The Special Sauce
One thing I love about this concept is that in order to get the deal, you have to get on the list. You can become a fan easily and add to the fan count, but to get the special price, you’ve gotta give them an email address. This does a few things.

• Tracks the number of fans that want to or are going to try get the deal instead of just the ones that actually show up
• Gives Targhee a way to follow up with these discount-loving skiers with other offers, deals, and passes
• Helps them make sure that only fans get the discount

I think it’s a very intelligent and clever decision on their part.

The takeaway I see is rather than encourage growth with the hopes of one person winning, find a way to encourage your fans to spread the good word of your fan page by making sure they ALL win if they help you reach the goal.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.